ARLIS colleagues:
Below is the text of an e-mail sent to the Library of Congress by the
ARLIS/NA Cataloging Advisory Committee (CAC) regarding LC's recent decision
to cease series authority work.
Kay Teel, CAC chair
[log in to unmask]
-------------------
To: Beacher J. Wiggins, Director for Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access,
Library of Congress
From: Cataloging Advisory Committee, Art Libraries Society of North America
(ARLIS/NA)
cc: Cataloging Policy and Support Office, Library of Congress
Date: May 31, 2006
Subject: The Library of Congress decision to cease series authority work
The Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS/NA) Cataloging Advisory
Committee (CAC) protests the Library of Congress's recent decision to cease
series authority work. While recognizing that the nature of cataloging is
changing and that the Library of Congress (LC) is trying to re-engineer its
operations for the future, the CAC regrets the manner in which the decision
was reached and announced. LC's decisions affect the entire cataloging
community in the United States, and to some degree even beyond U.S.
borders. There was no consultation and no thought to the impact this
decision would have on cooperative cataloging and on other cataloging
constituencies.
The CAC does not agree with LC's assessment that series titles are not
important access points requiring controlled access. Art researchers,
scholars, curators, and bibliographers do search for series, and this
decision will place a burden on them to do the work that authority control
provides. In addition, in some libraries' online catalogs, the decision
never to trace series will render series virtually invisible due to
indexing limitations. The establishment of series titles on the authority
level, where the information can be readily shared with thousands of
libraries, is more efficient than fixing individual bibliographic records
in individual library catalogs.
The CAC believes LC's decision demonstrates a disregard for the principles
expressed in IFLA's Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records
(FRBR), by ignoring the user tasks of find, identify, and select. Any
collocation of series into work, expression or manifestation clusters would
be more difficult without uniform access to series headings. At the most
basic level, it will hinder the ability of users to find known items. LC's
decision militates against the promise FRBR holds for making it easier for
our users to perceive bibliographic relationships. It particularly disturbs
us that the national library of the United States of America, considered a
leader and entrusted with the nation's information stewardship, appears
poised to abandon FRBR principles at the very time when the worldwide
cataloging community is embracing FRBR in development of new cataloging
codes and library systems.
Respectfully submitted,
Kay Teel,
Chair, Cataloging Advisory Committee, Art Libraries Society of North America
(ARLIS/NA)
__________________________________________________________________
Mail submissions to [log in to unmask]
For information about joining ARLIS/NA see:
http://www.arlisna.org/join.html
Send administrative matters (file requests, subscription requests, etc)
to [log in to unmask]
ARLIS-L Archives and subscription maintenance:
http://lsv.uky.edu/archives/arlis-l.html
Questions may be addressed to list owner (Judy Dyki) at: [log in to unmask]
